A dozen bright, very sad Minnesota students sat with me in a U.S. Department of Education (ED) conference room eight years ago. Under the Obama administration, the TRIO program staff had summarily rejected their application for a new grant. Their school had been in the program for decades, but the funding was about to end.

What happened? ED was strictly enforcing rules about such technicalities as the line spacing in a table. By the time their case came to me, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for TRIO, it was far too late for me to help.

TRIO is a set of college preparatory programs that have long been plagued by special-interest lobbying. For example, “prior participation points” for existing grantees prevent new applicants from winning grants unless Congress allocates additional money. The federal TRIO programs get about $1.2 billion per year. Laugh and cry: The TRIO lobby succeeded with legislation to prevent TRIO dollars from being used in any randomized controlled study to determine whether TRIO programs actually work.

Under Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, I successfully advocated that we make irrelevant technical details like font size merely recommended, not mandatory. Yet even such minor efforts against bureaucratic mindlessness rarely prevail. The administrative state includes not just deep-state obstructionists but also, more maddeningly, a thicket—a minefield—a behemoth of poorly designed and poorly operating processes that divert energy and funds into a DC bureaucracy that’s far removed from real people with real challenges.

In short, DC bureaucrats have little incentive to make good choices for other people with yet other people’s money. It’s at the root of the failures of the “creative federalism” by which successive administrations beginning with President Johnson have centralized power at the expense of the states.

That’s why it’s amazing, smart, and honorable that Secretary Linda McMahon’s ED is successfully dismantling itself. Streamlining the bureaucracy and giving programs such as TRIO and GEAR UP (another college prep program) a fresh start in new agencies, subject to ED’s final authority, is an outstanding move.

Even better, just about the entire range of programs at the Office of Postsecondary Education will move into the Department of Labor under contractual arrangements. (The Hispanic-Serving Institutions programs, in litigation over their likely unconstitutional ethnic quotas, are probably remaining at ED to avoid complications.)

Substantively, the point of the moves ED announced this week is to integrate the nation’s education and workforce agendas. Will that lead to even more centralization of power? Time may tell. Even if it does, a fresh start with a new remit to consider America’s workforce will be salutary for these programs.

The greater value will come when Congress and ED finally return education to the states. Imagine how Minnesota would have handled its own funds when a dozen crying kids appealed for a measure of humanity and reason. Unfortunately, though, Ronald Reagan’s famous 1964 line resonates: “A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

Ultimately, federal redistribution of wealth from taxpayers back to the states via education funding should not exist in the first place. Too much money drops into bureaucracy even with block grants. But ending all federal funding is crazy talk; that’s politically infeasible for now.

Back to reality: I expect we’ll see a core staff retained at ED plus a small group detailed to each new agency for the handover. Too many of the longtime ED staff in these programs—as the career senior executive staff themselves could attest—are there just for the paycheck or to help their university friends get the most taxpayer money with the least accountability. But the staff who remain at ED or are detailed to Labor are likely to be the public servants who are the most serious, most efficient, and best able to demonstrate that the programs can thrive in the new structure.

In the long run, of course, any structure will tend to degrade under the usual incentives of bureaucracies, as Ludwig von Mises described incisively. At the same time, these programs are not hard to run. The money comes in, the applicants are assessed, and the funds are obligated by September 30 each year. To be frank, there is already little to no accountability once the money goes out (stories to be saved for another day). It is hard to imagine an assessment of the new structure demonstrating any worse outcomes for applicants, grantees, or the students they serve.

Secretary McMahon would be wise not to stop at the program administrators. I recommend also detailing many of ED’s legal and accounting staff to the new agencies. The integration should become so engrained that it will be hard for future administrations to go back to the broken status quo.

Finally, I hope the administration is thinking about expanding contracts with private contractors to do even more of ED’s business. When public-private partnerships are designed well, they can give private contractors the right incentives to maximize quality and efficiency and minimize principal–agent problems. (When designed badly, though, government contracts readily do the opposite.)

Under the leadership of senior Trump appointees, experts who know what they’re doing, the plan to dismantle ED is likely to succeed with flying colors.

Adam Kissel is a visiting lecturer at Trinity College and a board member of the National Association of Scholars.